The access method is widely used to down load Web pages based upon the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to client personal computers (PC) through the world-wide web (www) or the Internet. In the conventional high-speed access methods, cash is primary used to maintain the fixed or static web pages close to the client computers. These techniques are designed to substantially reduce the cost of transmitting the pages to the client computers. On the other hand, to accommodate varied demands, a www page generation technique dynamically generates web pages based upon the requests and users at a www server site. The dynamic web pages are used, for example, in a catalogue in electronic commerce or E-commerce. The dynamic page generation method involves the costs associated with the page generation and the transmission of the pages to the clients.
The web pages include information to generate the client's display screen. In other words, in the www system, it is a unit of information which is specified by an address or Universal Resource Locator (URL) and is to be displayed via a www browser. The web page information includes text data in the HTML or in the XML, and graphics data in the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) or in the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) format. The term, page can be also used outside the www system, and it means information which is locally shown on the client PC screen.
To further illustrate the prior art page access or generation techniques, some examples are described below. For example, an article entitled, “WWW Interactive and Read-Ahead System Design and Package,” Computer Software, Pp. 48–61, Vol. 15, No 2 (1998) discloses a technique to transmit a user site a static page in response to a user page request and that the static page is previously authored using an editor such as a HTML authoring tool. FIG. 1 shows an exemplary conventional access method of the static Web pages. An author generates static pages 90 and stores them in a server 11. A user sends the server 11 a down-load request for one or more of the stored static Web pages 90 via a browser 35 through a network 2. In response to the down-load request, the server 11 downloads the browser 35 the requested Web pages to the user via network 2. The static Web pages cannot be customized according to user information and or user requests.
Now referring to FIG. 2, another prior art page access technique involves a proxy server 40, which is a system cash for cashing requested static page 90 into cashed page 91 from a server 22 in response to a user request via a browser 35 through a network 2. Later, in response to a request to the same cashed page 91 in the proxy server 40, the proxy server 40 inquires the server 22 whether or not the cashed information 91 has been updated at the server site 22 since the last cashing operation. If there has not been any update on the requested static page 90, the page access technique reuses the cashed page 91 via the proxy server 40. The above Computer Software article discloses the proxy based page access technique. In summary, the proxy based page access technique reduces a number of transmissions of the static web pages from the www server 22. To a heavy-access client, a copy of the cashed pages is sent from the most closely situated proxy server so as to process the page requests in a high-speed. In certain embodiments, the proxy server resides within the browser. As described above, the static Web pages cannot be customized according to user information and or user requests.
FIG. 3 illustrates a prior art push access technique. An example of the push access technique includes Microsoft's Active Channel. A push server 94 has a push a push definition such as in the Channel Definition Format (CDF). A push client 93 receives the push definition 95 and downloads the web pages 95 from the push server 94 into a client local cash 97 based upon the CDF in response to a client's time trigger which is asynchronous with the user page request. In other words, the web page is transparently downloaded to the push client server 93 from the push server 94 without the user intervention. The CDF specifies not only the web pages to be distributed or downloaded but also a distribution time. The push client server 93 locally processes the user page request and returns the locally cashed page 97 to the user if the user page request specifies the locally cashed pages 97. Because of the access to the client rather than the server, the push access technique is advantageously high-speed. Chapter 3 of “First XML,” Nikkei BP Publication (1997) discloses the above described push access technique.
Still referring to FIG. 3, despite the above described features, the push access technique has the following disadvantages. While the push access technique enables the push client server 93 to perform high-speed access, the push client server 93 is unable to interactively download the information from the push server 94. To customize the information, the push server 94 must generate and store various versions of the static web page information. Furthermore, the CDF must be individually customized to correspond to the various versions of the static web pages. As described above, the static Web pages cannot be customized according to user information and or user requests.
Now referring to FIG. 4, another prior art example of an efficient page access technique includes the read-ahead technique that is also disclosed in the above Computer Software article. The read-ahead techniques are further grouped into an association type and a statistic type. The association type read-ahead technique scans a content of the static web page 90 that has been transmitted from the www server 11 in response to an initial user request via a www browser 35 via a network 2. Based upon the scanned web page 90 and a predetermined set of rules, a next-page analysis unit 98 determines other associated web pages that may be subsequently requested, and a batch page calling unit 99 reads ahead these associated web pages into a cash 91 in a proxy server 40 via the network 2 independent of the user request. If the subsequent user request indeed specifies the read-ahead web pages in the cash 91, the www browser 35 has a high-speed access to the static web pages in the cash 91 for displaying the web page information. In summary, the association type read-ahead technique saves the download time from the remote server 11 and stores the web pages in the local cash 91 in the proxy server 40 in advance of the user requests. The static read-ahead web pages in the cash 91 are shared among users whose www browsers 35 share the proxy server 48. As described above, the static Web pages cannot be customized according to user information and or user requests.
Still referring to FIG. 4, the statistic type read-ahead technique is generally similar to the above described association type read-ahead technique except that the next-page analysis unit 98 statistically processes the scanned web page and determines other associated web pages that may be subsequently requested based upon statistics. Unfortunately, the statistic type read-ahead technique increases the traffic and the benefit of the local cash is marginal. The subsequent web page requests often end up downloading the requested pages 90 from the www server 11 rather than the cash 91 in the proxy server 40.
To customize web pages according to user information and or user requests, referring to FIG. 5, a common gate way interface (CGI) is illustrated. In general, in response to a user request via a www browser 35 and a network, a page generation unit 23 in a www server 11 generates a page 82 from data 22 and a template 23A. In particular, the page generation unit 23 dynamically generates a HTML page 92 by inserting certain data from the data 22 into the HTML template 23A according to a processing script in the template. The www server 11 transmits the generated HTML page 92 back to the www browser 35 via the network 2 for displaying the information in the HTML page 82. Specifically, the Japanese Patent Publications 8-22498 and 9-26970 respectively disclose a search engine for an item in a virtual shopping mall and the dynamically customized www page generation. Using the above exemplary shopping environment, the user specifies a specific one of the templates 23A, and the page generation unit 23 dynamically generates a specific shopping catalogue for each user request based upon the specified template 23A and associated data from the data base 22. In contrast to the above described conventional static web page per item, since the dynamic pages allow the author of the web pages to substantially reduce the development effort, the cost associated with the web page development is also substantially reduced. Furthermore, the dynamic page generation advantageously enables the generation of a web page that contains information such as a user name which is not available in advance of the user request. On the other hand, for each access, the dynamic web page generation requires a certain amount of time to get necessary data, to analyze the template and to generate a web page.
In summary, the above described conventional static and dynamic web page access techniques pose problems for the current need for accessing the web pages. On one hand, although the static web page access techniques allows high-speed access, these conventional techniques fail to accomplish customization of the web pages according to user information and or user requests. On the other hand, although the conventional dynamic web page generation technique allows customization of the web pages according to user information and or user requests, the conventional dynamic generation technique is incapable of high-speed access. The conventional dynamic web page generation techniques unnecessarily generates the same page when multiple page generation requests for the same page are issued by a plurality of users. The server resources are wasted on the unnecessarily repeated web page generation. Let alone, the conventional dynamic web page generation techniques do not generally take advantage of the proxy server.